The Gruffalo

The only problem I have with these beautifully drawn, British animated shorts, like The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom is that they seem to me a bit too long for shorts. This wonderful tale was slightly better than Room on the Broom, thou. Searching for The Gruffalo's Child right away!

It's even better than the book. This is everything that 'Where the Wild Things Are' should have been, but wasn't.

The animation style is interesting, and I just love the dialogue and voice acting. We have a four year old, and he just loves this film. At about a half-hour, it's not too long for kids that can't sit through an hour or longer movie without getting disinterested.

The music is beautiful as well. Very memorable and peaceful.

If you have a little one, I recommend this film - it's one of those 'kid' films that is just as fun for the parents to watch, thanks to all the little nuances put into it (like how every living thing except the mouse gets put through the food chain).

I absolutely loved The Gruffalo. It is a little too short, but all the same it is still superb. The animation is beautiful, very true to the illustrations of the book, plus the characters are well modelled and move convincingly and the backgrounds and colours are ravishing. The story is cute and charming, simple it is, but simple as in a good way. The dialogue is always amusing, it is done in rhyme and bounces along with no problem at all. The pace is brisk and the characters like the story are simple but still engaging. The voice cast are all solid across the board as well. So overall, just superb, if it had been a tad longer it would have been perfection. 9/10 Bethany Cox

This came on BBC1 on Christmas Day, and like Wallace and Gromit before it, I recorded it so it could be watched later. I've finally got around to watching it, and I was pleasantly surprised.

With a solid voice cast voicing the animals, the rhyming dialogue is sweet and never annoying.

The story of the mouse, as told by a mother squirrel to her two babies is episodic but suitably so. The jokes were funny and it was even somewhat dark in places where it needed to be.

The animation is probably not as polished as Lost and Found(2008) but has it's own caricatured, simplistic charm and is aesthetically faithful to the book(haven't read it, but have seen the cover).

Overall, an entertaining and amusing short about deception and survival done in a colourful and light way. I enjoyed it along with The First Snow of Winter, also based on a picture book, that has a similar tone, also featuring a 'big, bad' wolf. Good for young kids and the young at heart.

Before a mouse goes for wander in the forest to find a nut, he fails to consider that he is just about bite-size for most of it's other dwellers. There's a snake, an owl - who does seem to find it quite difficult to fly in a straight line, and a ferocious fox. Perhaps he has read "1001 Nights" though, because when faced with becoming sandwich fodder, he conjures up an image for each of them of this great and menacing monster. This does the trick until, well guess who he meets amongst the trees? This is a simple story that lends itself well to some endearing and characterful stop-motion animation. It's all in their eyes! The narrative offers us the perspective of an innocent child as we explore and the mouse improvises, often humorously, to escape his tricky predicaments. It's an half an hour that is easy to watch and I did quite enjoy it.